Record-breaking winner of all the major science fiction awards - the Hugo, Nebula, Arthur C. Clarke, and Locus - Ann Leckie has a huge, enthusiatic fan following of her Imperial Radch Trilogy:…Read More

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Saturday Food Chain

Michael Olson produced, wrote and/or photographed feature-length news for a variety of media, including the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner newspapers, Skiing and Small Space Gardening magazines,NBC, ABC, Australian Broadcast Commission, and KQED Public Television networks. His production and photography helped win a National Emmy nomination for NBC Magazine with David Brinkley. Olson is the author of MetroFarm, the Ben Franklin Book of the Year Finalist and Executive Producer and Host of the syndicated Saturday Food Chain radiotalk show, which received the Ag/News Show of the Year Award from the California Legislature. He recently authored Tales from a Tin Can, which is the oral-history of a World War II US Navy destroyer that earned a Starred Review from Publishers Weekly.

Business Person

Olson designed, blended and packaged a fertilizer for container-grown house and garden plants; certified and registered the product as a “specialty fertilizer” with the State of California; and sold the product to the national lawn and garden market. Olson has over two decades of broadcast media management and, as General Manager of newstalk radio stations KSCO & KOMY in Santa Cruz, California, has helped hundreds of locally-owned businesses compete against national chains. Olson is currently a partner in the MO MultiMedia Group of Santa Cruz, California.

Some of us eat to live. Others live to eat. The rest of us have lost control of eating.

In fact, many people throughout the developed world now suffer from a clinically significant eating disorder at some point in their life. These disorders include anorexia nervosa, binge eating disorder, bulimia nervosa, or disorders not otherwise specified.

Contrary to what some might think, eating disorders are not a fad or lifestyle choice; they are real, complex, and devastating conditions that have very serious consequences for one’s health and productivity. The extent to which we in the developed world suffer from eating disorders leads us to ask…

To what extent do we suffer from eating disorders? Who is most vulnerable to losing control of their eating? How does one address a loved who has an eating disorder? How are eating disorders treated? And…

Out there in the oceans of the world, where the life we will eat sometime in the future, there exists giant patches of decomposing plastic trash that some say are as big as North America.

In truth, these patches, or gyres, are hard to see by the casual observer, or by satellites high in the sky, as they are made up of tiny nodules of decomposing plastic polymers that grow in size as one approaches the center of the spiraling vortex of currents.

Nevertheless, the patches are huge, and cover large extents of the ocean, and so lead us to ask…

To what extent does plastic trash inhabit our oceans?

Does this decomposing plastic trash find its way back into our food chain?

What can be done, if anything, to ameliorate the damage of our plastic trash?

Is it possible to throw plastic away?Guest: Captain Charles Moore, Founder The Algalita Marine Research Institute

Out there in the oceans of the world, where the life we will eat sometime in the future, there exists giant patches of decomposing plastic trash that some say are as big as North America.

In truth, these patches, or gyres, are hard to see by the casual observer, or by satellites high in the sky, as they are made up of tiny nodules of decomposing plastic polymers that grow in size as one approaches the center of the spiraling vortex of currents. Nevertheless, the patches are huge, and cover large extents of the ocean, and so lead us to ask…To what extent does plastic trash inhabit our oceans? Does this decomposing plastic trash find its way back into our food chain?What can be done, if anything, to ameliorate the damage of our plastic trash?And finally…

Are crop dusters now essential to agriculture?Guest: Bert Atwood, Author of My Father Was A Crop Duster

To succeed in the business of farming, one must, to the extent possible, exert control over elements in the environment, among them nutrients and pests.

When one’s farm is small, as farms tended to be in the distant past, control was exerted by the tools in hand, or by the implements pulled by animals. As technology progressed, and brought forth new control measures like mechanized tractors and chemical fertilizers and pesticides, farms grew larger, and larger, and larger still.

Today, some farms are measured in the tens of thousands of acres. To exert control to such an extent, many farmers rely on the services of crop dusters. For a few dollars per acre, these magnificent men, and women, in their flying machines can stop a threatening fungus, kill noxious weeds, and fertilize a hungry crop.

In fact, crop dusters now make it possible for one farmer to grow a thousand acres of crops without weeds or pests. This realization leads us to ask…

Guest: Stephen Gardner, Director of Litigation Center for Science in the Public Interest

It is a food selling $40 billion a year, but there is really nothing to it but a suggestion that really doesn’t mean anything.

Many of the foods once labeled “Natural,” like Goldfish crackers, Naked juice, and Silk soy drink, are now shedding the label to become, well, whatever is next!

Consider, for example, Silk, a milk-like drink made from soy. Silk was introduced as an “organic” food in 1996 by the White Wave Company at the Natural Foods Expo in Anaheim. In 2002, White Wave was purchased by Dean Foods, and by 2005 the organic drink was generating sales in of $350 million a year. In 2009, Dean switched from organic soybeans to conventional beans, and Organic Silk became Natural Silk. Today, Silk is just Silk.

One of the reasons food and drink companies, like Dean, PepsiCo, and Campbell Soup are shedding the natural label is to avoid an avalanche of lawsuits alleging false advertising. According to a recent post in the Wall Street Journal, at least 100 lawsuits have been filed in the past two years “challenging the natural claims of Unilever PLC’s Ben & Jerry’s, Kellog Co.’s Kashi, Beam Inc.’s Skinnygirl alcohol drinks and dozens of other brands.

These lawsuits lead us to ask…

Why do consumers spend $40 billion a year on the suggestion of natural?

Can we learn to cook, eat and live with abandon?Guest: Karen Karbo, Author Julia Child’s Rules: Lessons on Savoring Life

At six foot three inches, she was taller than most men, not particularly pretty, and had a voice like a cartoon character.

Some say she was a Che Guevera armed with a pound of butter and a sauce pan. Maybe so, but she was not born the revolutionary of cooking, eating, and living.

In fact, she was born into a straight-laced family, a formica kitchen, tv dinners, and oh yes, golf at the country club. Then war came and everything changed for Julia. She found herself working intelligence in Asia, where she met a man named Paul Childs. After the war, she became Julia Childs, and the Childs ran off to Paris, where Paul took her to dine at a favorite restaurant. That meal marked the birth of Julia Childs, revolutionary.

In 1932 and 1933, approximately seven million Ukranians and Cossacks were starved to death in the breadbasket of the Soviet Union by the central government of Joseph Stalin.

Some scholars suggest the Holodomor (“extermination by hunger”) was caused by bad weather and poor planning – an accident of policy­. It was, after all, the time in which Stalin’s central government was going about the countryside eliminating private property. The resulting economic chaos, the argument goes, was enough to cause the killings.

Other scholars suggest the Holodomor was an act of willful intent. This argument points to the recalcitrance of the Ukranian people toward Stalin’s central government. The Holodomor, their argument goes, was a deliberate act of genocide.

Stalin’s starving to death of tens of millions of Ukrainians and Cossacks leads us to ask…

How did Stalin’s government take control of the Ukraine’s food?

How did that government manage to withhold the food from the people who grew the food?